Frank Biermann and his father, Fred, moved to Mount Prospect from Elk Grove Township in March 1911 when Frank was 14. Fred was a teamster and Frank was his assistant.

William Busse and Mount Prospect’s other civic leaders had started the Mount Prospect Improvement Association to add streets, sidewalks and 25 kerosene streetlamps to the tiny commerce center several years before the community had enough residents to incorporate. Busse convinced the Biermanns to relocate so that they could use their wagons and teams of horses to build sidewalks and dig foundations for homes.

“Everything was mud, prairie and cornfields then. They wanted to make a nice town out of it, and everybody got busy. They were getting ready to build sidewalks and needed somebody to do the teaming,” Frank Biermann recalled during a 1969 public presentation.

In early 1915, after he turned 18, Frank Biermann joined the fledgling Mount Prospect Volunteer Fire Department, which had been organized in late 1913. In those days, homeowners paid a subscription to subsidize the department’s costs. Only those who subscribed received fire services.

In 1927, Frank Biermann was unanimously elected chief, a position he held until he retired in early 1956.

He believed in strict discipline and was an innovator. In 1936, he organized local farmers into a rural fire league and instructed them in how to try to help the firefighters.

Firefighting was not a full-time job. The chief received $7 per call, the assistant chiefs got $6 and each fireman received $5.

So Biermann worked for Continental Bank in Chicago until 1919 when he married Commissioner William Busse’s daughter, Helen, and went to work in his father-in-law’s hardware store/Buick dealership/International Harvester farm equipment dealership.

In 1929, the business was broken up and Biermann took over Busse-Biermann Hardware, which he operated until 1973. Herman Meyn purchased the farm implement store and the Busses kept the Buick dealership.

“Frank was the kind of businessman who treated everyone like he wanted to be treated himself — courteously,” newspaper columnist Dolores Haugh recalled after his death in June 1990 at the age of 92.

“When we first moved into town in 1952, my husband, Bob, became acquainted with Frank at the Busse-Biermann Hardware Store. Not only was he greeted like an old friend when he entered the store, but Frank came to our house to help him install whatever it was he bought because Bob was new at the house maintenance game.”